Thursday, November 20, 2008

I am preparing new demos of z-ground engine recently. What I want to do half an year ago were almost finished. Source code of the engine is still under optimization. I think the code v0.1 for flash player 9 will be available in the following year - 2009.

Optimization is a really taught task. I'm disappointed at the efficiency of my z-ground engine but don't know how to make it faster. The demo below shows some new features of the engine. I'm sure no PC can run it at the speed of 20 FPS or above currently. That's why there are only pictures instead of the swf. I am also considering upgrade it on flash player 10.

new features of z-ground

1.walls & ceilings

This enable us to create rooms on the ground.

The way of drawing walls is totally different from the pre-released demo and much more efficient.

2.z-sky vs b-sky

You can choose between z-sky and background sky. I prefer z-sky because it's more real.3.terrain

Our ground now can have height. It's real terrain because you can get the height value of any point on the ground. That means you can apply a height map to create terrains.4.time of the day

We can change the time of our world, the position of sun, brightness of stage, color of the clouds and shadows of objects will change according to the time.

5.real time soft shadows

Objects can display shadows on the ground, that are real time shadows which will change to the position of the sun.

6.sun ray effect

The sun now have soft rays.

7.water and reflection

We can create lakes on the ground.

8.textures without any picture & image

All the textures of this new demo are created and rendered by my texture generator engine. Actually, the first demo showed above is a pure code swf. You can create textures by code and render them on the fly. But if you want to create some more colorful world, you can choose your pictures as textures.

9.bump mapping

I don't think this will be very useful. But you can create bump ground or walls if you like.